Research Case // Jodie Schulthess, Sasha Loktik, Tetiana Titarieva, Julia Ahlberg
#Task: Understanding the CIEP Utopian Schools
Jodie Schulthess, Sasha Loktik, Tetiana Titarieva, Julia Ahlberg
###Building a community
Pedagogy had an influence on the social impact because of the close connection to the future generation. Also, architecture influences the pedagogical process. In this case, conditions for the study process in the school are very important and could be adapted. Animation is connected to activities which create opportunities and makes it possible to work with children.
The activities used at the CIEP were very much influencing the pedagogy aspects and foremost the social impact. Additionally, the activities required the architecture/infrastructure needed so to give space for the many activities performed at the CIEP.
The pedagogy completely changed, and so did the architecture and got adapted into a full-time educational building. As all schools looked the same, equality between everyone was made possible.
Society was not well educated which influenced the programming/animation and made it full-time. The full-time education gave the opportunity to the parents to continue working on a regular basis and have their children stay at school for the whole day.
Having such a building in the whole country allowed the population to connect to each other and have community activities.
###Circle of pedagogy, programming/animation and activities
The activities were more a "product" out of the pedagogy as a mindset behind the school and the programming/animation aspects. By this, we mean that the aspects of pedagogy first influence the programming/animation, which will then be translated into the activities that were performed to achieve the pedagogy mindset of the CIEP. Therefore, there are different levels to the set-up of the activities.
More activities meant more exchange. Not only the children could join but everyone was welcome to do so, which created a community atmosphere.
###Conclusion
The CIEP case had in general many positive and negative aspects.
The school provided a new space for community activities and mainly a safe space for children to have an option for full-time supervision. The CIEP gave also equal opportunities for families and enabled full-time jobs for people. The creation of this environment supported locality and the spirit of a community.
The downsides, and therefore also reasons that the project did not fully succeed, were lack of financial sources, bureaucratic issues and lack of parental contribution in designing the educational programme. The architectural aspects contributed to noise issues, and a bad ventilation system and the CIEP was confronted with several problems of security in terms of stealing and misusage of property. The biggest negative aspect was incidences of abuse within the social parent programme.
